The main themes of this blog are: operating systems, software applications, cellphones, smartphones, microprocessors and hardware. This is a blog about my thoughts on the mentioned subjects. I also post about IT projects I'm working on.

Intel 8080 and the way the 40pins limits it’s IO performance.

Another lesson on microprocessors and the intel8080 especially. The Intel 8080 has 40pins which enables it communicate with the outside world. The processors is 16bit bits internally but it only has enough pins on the databuss to fetch 8bits at a time. The processor is able to process 16bit instructions by fetching two 8bit memory positions after each other through use of a technology called multiplexing. The problem is that the multiplexing technology is slow so at best the intel 8080 is only a little bit faster than an 8bit processor of similar specifications. The only way of speeding up the Intel 8080 and making it able to load 16bits at a time from memory would be to give it more pins to communicate with the outside world.

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This entry was posted on February 23, 2012 at 4:37 pm and is filed under hardware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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